* over 88 Russian-language documents and extracts from American and European sources, analyzed and translated -- they include extracts from birth, death, and marriage records of various formats; gazetteer entries; revision lists; obituaries; population registers; military service records; passports; etc. * sections on Russian grammar, phonetics, and spelling * information on how to locate records in America and Europe * a chapter on gazetteers and how to use them, with 10 maps showing Russia's changing borders and divisions, and Letter-Writing Guides for Russian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian * a 77-page vocabulary with over 4,000 entries, featuring archaic terms and spellings most likely to be found in records but rarely included in modern dictionaries * a 26-page list of over 700 Christian and Jewish given names with equivalents in English, Latin, Lithuanian, and Polish